


a man like no other

by auntshoe



Series: the difference between us [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 12:05:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3895675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auntshoe/pseuds/auntshoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian comes to Bull when they're not in Skyhold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a man like no other

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Elthadriel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Elthadriel) for beta-reading this fic. Any remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Title from [alt-J "Nara"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtmrYisoxXA).
> 
> The fic can be read as a standalone. I'm just piling up my headcanons about these two in this series.

He woke up in Empise du Lion. Suledin Keep was a cold, miserable place, even with the Inquisition trying to make the place more livable. The keep was huge and had more rooms than the small Inquisition squad stationed here needed, so it was a rare occasion when everyone got a place for themselves so far from Skyhold. It wasn’t much better than sleeping in a tent, though. Much colder, for sure.

Dorian shifted under the blanket, curling in on himself as tight as he could but it didn’t help him get warm at all.

He thought back to nights in Skyhold, where sleeping in his own room was becoming a more and more seldom event. It was a bizarre development, one he certainly did not expect when he came south with not much thought for his own future. He never expected anything like it ever, really. He had a goal, a cause. He had stopped hoping for anything of this sort about the same time he realised that house Pavus would not get its precious perfect heir after all.

Bull always made it clear that he was welcome to stay. Most nights he didn’t, at first. Sleep was sometimes a fitful affair for him, and he preferred to deal with it in the confines of his own space. But the walk back to his quarters was long and unpleasant after doing things he never thought he would have the opportunity to do on a more or less regular basis, and Bull’s room was a strangely enticing mix of garish and sparse, just like the inhabitant himself, the bed large enough to hold two people, even considering Bull’s size.

On that note, the amount of time he spent considering Bull’s size lately was worrying. His size and every other thing about him.

He’d woken up from a nightmare, and his thoughts found their way to Bull, seeking something solid and comforting. A bottomless void of things he dragged after himself from Tevinter were rolling like thunder at the back of his mind in the aftermath of the nightmare he didn’t really remember, save for fraying remnants of emotions. Something hollow and painful. Something about that feeling when your childhood home becomes your prison. Something about your father wanting you to turn into a person you could never be, even if you desperately wanted to, once.

Every now and then the Fade showed him all the possible outcomes, every little thing he imagined after escaping. Not knowing what such ritual could entail only made it worse, since imagination was prone to visualizing things in the worst possible ways.

_Should’ve been a good boy, Dorian. Should’ve just stayed and lived long enough to become a shell of yourself._

Demons were treacherous things, but Dorian was yet to see a demon worse than some of the people he knew.

He was cold, and he couldn’t fall back asleep. He wanted to be somewhere warm. With someone warm. Without giving himself time to change his mind, he rose from the bed, not letting go of the blanket, wrapping it around himself like a coat.

When he reached Bull’s room, he hesitated for a moment, with his hand raised to knock. Deciding against it, he opened the door and entered the room, closing it behind himself. It was dark, the faint light of the moons shining through the window making the shadows just seem deeper. Even in darkness he saw Bull immediately turning to the door, raising his head from the pillow.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Bull’s voice carried across the room, soft and sleepy. Dorian could make out his form in the dark, head tilted to where Dorian was standing with his back to the door.

Dorian didn’t move from his position. Everything they’d done to this point happened in the safety of Skyhold, mostly in Bull’s room. They didn’t speak of it outside of the moments of intimacy much, and Dorian clang to the false secrecy like it was the only thing keeping him afloat in a storm. He couldn’t convince himself that there was no need to hide this sort of thing here, so far from home. Logically, he knew it, but old habits died hard, and the shadow of Tevinter hung like a ball of iron, dragging him to the bottom of the ocean. He had to remind himself, over and over, that he was no longer there; but no matter where he went, parts of his homeland were always with him, in him, and he was not sure he ever escaped it at all.

Bull had been trying to coax him out with his obnoxious, unabashed flirting, saying things about his door being always open, about Dorian being inclined to do the forbidden – and he wished, desperately, that the last one was true. It would’ve been so much easier, if it was just idle curiosity for him, but it wasn’t, not ever. If it had been, he would’ve slept with Bull once and forgot all about it, moved on with his life, with his guard up and in no danger of feeling… of feeling. As it were, fate had its own brand of humor, and this time, Dorian was the butt of the joke.

With Bull and his flirting, Dorian for the first time in his life found himself at a loss of words. He didn’t have a clever reply or a snide remark. If he was honest with himself (and he usually tried so hard not to be), Dorian admired Bull’s shamelessness, envied it, even. He came up with a hundred smart answers later, in his head, which only served to frustrate him more. It bothered him that Bull could make him speechless so easily. At the same time it intrigued him.

Coming to Bull outside of Skyhold made it more real somehow and that – that scared Dorian. But, sometimes one had to stop running and confront their fears and while Dorian was good at running he was starting to get winded.

“You gonna stand there all night?” Bull broke the silence. “Come here, it’s freezing.” He lifted the blanket invitingly.

And that was the thing about Bull, he left his door open for Dorian, lifted his blanket for him in the cold night of Emrise Du Lion, bickered with him good-naturedly during long travels, invited him for drinks in the tavern, made him feel things he never thought he could feel. He had no idea what these feelings meant, and he didn’t know what to make of them. He collected all these things, in his mind, like a stupid, idiotic magpie with a pile of shiny trash, not knowing what to do with it, but still feeling an uncontrollable desire to hoard it all, keep it away from anyone else.

_It’s nothing_ , he tried to tell himself. Bull was just a nice person, when he wasn’t chopping off various heads and limbs, that is, but no one was faultless in the Inquisition. Dorian remembered hearing giggles and whispers between girls back in Skyhold, Cole’s comments about women and men in villages they passed through. He didn’t hear anything of the sort lately, but nevertheless.

For now, though, in these moments between them, for a little while, Bull was only his. And Dorian was a greedy man, a hungry man, a weak and selfish one. He would take everything he could while he could, even if it devoured him whole, in the end.

He took a step towards Bull, who watched his every move with an unreadable look. In the dark, the distance between them seemed to stretch on forever.

He kept walking towards where Bull was waiting for him.

**Author's Note:**

> You can come say hi to me [on tumblr](http://auntshoe.tumblr.com/), hit me with prompts and headcanons while I’m on a writing roll about these two.


End file.
